Busted Leg Epilogue

I've gotten phone calls from family members and loved ones since this happened, and I've done pretty well sounding chipper and happy, like nothing's wrong. Oh yeah, I sound good, I'm just less mobile...that's the kind of mirth and levity I try to bring to phone calls.

Yeah, less mobile, that's it. I'm stuck. I'm a prisoner of my own apartment and the two hardest and most painful things I do revolve using the toilet. I hate not being able to bathe normally; not being able to go downstairs and walk to the beach or the coffee shop to work on my novel. I can't move my car for street cleaning. I can't wash dishes or make dinners or go shopping for food or cruise around on my bike to clear my head--which is ever increasingly filling with Vicodin.

It's just one of those things, I tell myself. I had been planning that trip to a campsite to sequester myself for the first draft work, but now, since that's not happening for a while, I'm facing the prospect of having to do that here...which shouldn't be so bad, since one of the themes is the uneasy relationship between sanity and solitude. No, this should be good.

Constant pain and un-comfort do wonders for artistic creativity.

Also, a note about health insurance: my mom was very nervous about the outcome of this whole thing upon our finances due to the state of my current health insurance (which is none).

I did have a few incidences where the bureaucracy was maddening: I asked the gentleman who was taking my vitals one night if he could please take the blanket off of my left foot. I was laying in bed with my left leg splinted one night before surgery and the last nurse had covered my legs up with the blanket, and right then the weight on my foot was no longer bearable, and I was having a hard time rolling the blanket off. The man taking my vitals told me he would notify my nurse, as if he wasn't allowed to deal with patients in that kind of direct manner. Maybe that's the case, but you can't convince that's efficient. Maybe efficient at not getting sued, but in the end the patient suffers.

That's another thing, the suffering patient. At certain points I got the idea that that's just how it's supposed to work. Like everyone knows that since you don't have insurance, you're just going to have to suffer a little more than if you were insured. Like American's tacitly agree that if you're in prison, being butt-raped is a regrettable, yet acceptable side effect, they seem to understand that if you're uninsured, well, then the wait's longer, the staff's overworked and underpaid, and you're experience will be different. I once complained to a nurse about the amount of bubbles in my IV drip. Well, I more or less brought it to her attention. I learned later that that had been an unlikely amount to have done me harm, but at the time it was nerve wracking. She bled the bubbles out and hooked me back up.

I wasn't planning on being uninsured. I was planning on not getting hurt though, and we can see how that played out. I must say that had I still been insured I would be screwed. I don't skateboard, or skydive, or race a car for fun or for money, and I don't really even drive on the LA freeways anymore, so I never would have had reason to spend more of my paycheck on better insurance to lower my deductible. That wasn't ever a thought, and since I ride my bike a lot, had this kind of freak accident happened when I still working for the corporation with that insurance, I would have sailed up to the ten-thousand dollar deductible pretty quick like, and be paying this off just like another credit-card or student loan--ie, for many years.

Not having insurance, and being sent to the UCLA-Harbor location had a few results: long wait-times and overworked staff; quality surgeons and overall care; a bill that we're going to be able to pay. See, this isn't going to be free, but we're being billed based on our income level, and we're imagining it'll be reasonable.

What they should do is just lump all of the uninsured people into a group, charge us ten bucks a month, and voila! You have the largest and most powerful negotiating group of insured people in the state, and there's no-one left uninsured.

Whatever. The recovery is underway. The swelling is gone, and the bruising is going away. Sleeping at night is the third worst thing I regularly do, but it's too hard to explain what's up there.

I go in for a follow up on July 2nd, and since I can begin to flex my knee, maybe I'll get instructions on the right course for physical therapy.

Tuxedo is having a hard time with it all. He's scared of the crutches, he's confused why I won't play with him or why I'm so jumpy about him walking on me while I'm laid up. He and I are both trying to adjust.

Se la vie.